Welcome to Historia’s most popular regular feature, our round-up of books published by members of the Historical Writers’ Association (HWA) to look out for during the coming year. For 2024, there are more than 200 books covering history, biography, and historical fiction and spanning eras from Ancient Greece and Egypt to the 1980s. They sweep […]
Ovid the policeman
The poet Ovid spent some time as one of Rome’s tresviri, the men who supervised activities such as policing. Could he have been involved in solving crimes? For Fiona Forsyth, this is “one of those gaps in history that it is my job as a historical novelist to fill”. Here she writes about how she […]
A Bitter Remedy by Alis Hawkins
Jesus College, Oxford, 1881. An undergraduate is found dead at his lodgings and the medical examination reveals some shocking findings. When the young man’s guardian blames the college for his death and threatens a scandal, Basil Rice, a Jesus College fellow with a secret to hide, is forced to act and finds himself drawn into […]
Chasing the Dragon by Mark Wightman
It’s Singapore, 1940. When a local fisherman discovers the body of a missing American archaeologist, supposedly drowned, Detective Inspector Betancourt of the Singapore Marine Police decides things don’t quite add up. The archaeologist was close to deciphering the hitherto-untranslatable script carved on a pre-colonial relic known as the Singapore Stone, and was in prime position to capture […]
Paris Requiem by Chris Lloyd
Paris in 1940. As the city adjusts to life under Nazi occupation, Detective Eddie Giral struggles to reconcile his job as a policeman with his new role enforcing a regime he cannot believe in but must work under. He’s sacrificed so much in order to survive in this new world, but the past is not […]
The Night of the Wolf by Cassandra Clark
Chester, 1400. Riding for his life, with a copy of Chaucer’s heretical Canterbury Tales in his possession, friar-sleuth Brother Chandler is ambushed on the road and wakes up in a stranger’s house. Is his ‘rescuer’, wool merchant John Willoughby, friend… or foe? Willoughby declares that he, like Chandler, has renounced the self-crowned King Henry IV […]
Ritual of Fire by DV Bishop
Florence. Summer, 1538, and a night patrol finds a wealthy merchant hanged and set ablaze in the city’s main square. More than mere murder, this killing is intended to put the fear of God into Florence. Forty years earlier, puritanical monk Girolamo Savonarola was executed the same way. Does this new killing mean his fanatical […]
Historia extract: Ritual of Fire by DV Bishop
To celebrate the publication of Ritual of Fire, DV Bishop’s third Cesare Aldo crime thriller set in 16th-century Florence, Historia is publishing an extract from the book – the whole first chapter. Thursday, May 23rd 1538. Cesare Aldo could still smell flesh burning, even from this distance. In Florence it would have been one scent […]